


Anam Chariad

by TravelingMagpie



Category: Sherlock (TV)
Genre: Gen, Originally Posted on FanFiction.Net, There's a tag for her which means someone else must have written her before, Was originally titled "Anam Cara" and can still be found that way on FF, but someone pointed out that "cara" was Irish-Gaelic and this was supposed to be Scottish-Gaelic, first chapter was written after season one, in mine her name is Rose and she's a Scottish dear, second chapter was written after season two, so in this version it's been changed to "anam charaid"
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-09-18
Updated: 2015-09-18
Packaged: 2018-04-21 09:03:41
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 2,460
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4823150
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/TravelingMagpie/pseuds/TravelingMagpie
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>John's relationship with Sherlock has got tongues wagging...and it irritates him. A talk with his Scottish grandmother is just the cure. UPDATE: now continuing with John's visit to Gran Rose after the fall. Basically an excuse for angst. Enjoy.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

John Hamish Watson was an Englishman by birth, but his ancestry on his mother’s side was purely Scottish. Hamish had been a family name for longer than anyone had bothered keeping records, and his grandmother Rose Connell—nearing ninety-three and as likely to kick up a jig as she had been at thirteen—was as full-blooded Scot as they came.

Once a month, as regularly as he could manage it, John took a weekend to visit her flat in Glasgow and eat her fresh-baked shortbread and listen to her complaints about “the youth of today” and how nobody in the government knew what they were doing. Her reedy voice and sharp wit kept him laughing long after he had started home, and she always sent him back with a sack full of sweets. He’d have lived with her, had it been reasonable, after he came back from Afghanistan, but Gran Rose’s tiny one-bedroom flat was too small for two, and she couldn’t really afford it anyway. Instead, he visited as often as he could. Goodness knows Harry didn’t, and they were more or less the only family Gran Rose had left.

Today, on a spring day that was unusually warm for the season, they sat out on her tiny balcony, overlooking the park that backed up to her housing complex.

“Look at that, then, Johnny,” she was saying as he handed her a mug of tea. “Look at all those little ones all out playing in the sunshine. Makes me wish I still had the energy to run around a playground like that.”

“Gran, you could do anything you put your mind to.” John sighed and sank into the chair beside her. Sherlock had kept him out late the last three nights running—literally, running—and between chasing his flatmate through the streets of London and keeping regular hours at the surgery, he was ready for a bit of rest.

“That’s nice of you to say, Johnny,” Gran Rose chuckled. She wrapped her long, thin hands around the hot mug and blew away the steam. “But most of my get-up-and-go has got-up-and-went.”

They sat in silence for a few minutes, sipping their tea and watching the children chasing each other about. The bright colors of the playground and the fresh hints of pink and green in the trees set a quiet, cheery mood over the day, and John felt himself sinking into a feeling of peace he rarely felt these days. It was too often that an emergency patient or one of Sherlock’s cases jerked him out of it.

“Tell me about yourself, then, John,” Gran Rose said at last, breaking the quiet. “What have you been up to since I saw you last?”

Reluctantly pulling himself back, John ran over the events of the last month in his mind. “Well…I told you about my flatmate.”

“That Sherlock Holmes fellow, yes.” Gran Rose squinted at him. “And is he working out?”

John grinned. “I think so, yeah. Life with Sherlock is never boring.”

Gran Rose nodded in satisfaction. “Men of our family don’t hold with boring,” she agreed. “Tell me about him.”

“Mm…describing Sherlock Holmes. That’s a new one.” He usually didn’t have to explain his flatmate. Usually, the name alone was enough to get a reaction—and usually, the reaction was _not_ a positive one. “He’s an odd bloke, I’ll say that much.”

“What does he do? For a living, I mean.”

“He’s a sort of…detective. He works with Scotland Yard, mostly, but takes a lot of private cases too.”

Gran Rose’s raised an eyebrow in fascination. “Really, now. Smart, then?”

John laughed. “Brilliant. I’ve never seen anyone as quick-witted as Sherlock. Bit too smart for his own good, actually.”

“What do you mean?” Gran Rose sat back in her chair and sipped at her tea.

Just yesterday, Sherlock had informed a grieving widow that her dead husband had been a philandering waste of skin with a string of lovers and a pile of debt taller than the London Eye. All of which, of course, he had deduced from the contents of the man’s bedroom. The poor woman had refused to believe him, but Sherlock had flung each individual deduction in her face until she was a quivering, weeping mess on the couch. John’s insistent, “Sherlock!” finally broke through the man’s self-made cloud of obliviousness, but he didn’t seem to understand, even when John tried explaining on the walk home, just exactly what he had done wrong.

“He can tell you what you had for breakfast by the crumbs on your shirt and where you went to school by how you tie your shoes.” John shrugged, and took a drink. “But he hasn’t the faintest notion of tact or…or…” he waved a hand helplessly. “If I hadn’t stitched him up three times in the last week and seen for myself that he bleeds like any normal bloke, I’d be convinced he was some kind of robot.”

“Mm.” Gran Rose nodded, closed her eyes, and pushing her rocking chair into motion. She opened one eye and squinted at him. “But you’re sticking around.”

Only two weeks ago, John had nearly been killed—had nearly gotten a friend killed—by Chinese crime lords. There was still a rush of adrenalin through his system whenever he thought about how close Sarah had come to being skewered, Sherlock to being strangled, and himself to being shot.

“Yeah.” John shook his head. “God help me, I’m sticking around.”

Gran Rose nodded. “Good for you.”

“People assume all sorts of things, though.” John tried to keep the irritation out of his voice, but Gran Rose had known him too long for that.

“Two apparently unattached men living in the same house and getting into all sorts of scrapes together?” She grinned cheekily. “I can only imagine the rumors.”

John grunted. “It’s pretty…annoying, to say the least.”

“But you do like this fellow?”

“Gran, he’s the sort of bloke you either hate or can’t get out of your head.” John waved a hand vaguely, trying to encompass the enigma that was Sherlock Holmes. “Sometimes I want to…want to pelt him with his own chemistry set, but I can’t imagine London without him.”

“Ah.” Gran Rose nodded wisely. “ _Anam charaid_.”

John furrowed his brow. “An emcar-what?”

“ _Anam charaid_. It’s an old Gaelic notion.” Gran Rose set aside her tea cup and leaned forward, motioning with her hands. “The old Celts believed that your soul was sort of…a cloud around you. Like an aura or some such.”

He wasn’t really following. But he recognized Gran Rose’s storytelling voice when he heard it, so he didn’t interrupt.

“They believed that when you met someone, your soul literally touched that persons’, and if you spent a lot of time with them, your souls would sort of…” she made a stirring motion with both hands. “Intermix.”

“Are you saying—”

She gave him an arched-brow look that said, _I’m not done yet._ He snapped his mouth shut.

“People who were really close friends, then, would actually have some of the other person’s soul inside of them. Which is, of course, utterly mental, but it’s a nice thought. Anyway.” She picked up her tea again. “They called these sorts of really close friends _anam charaid_. It means soul-friend.”

“It’s a quixotic notion, I’ll give you that,” John ventured. “But I hardly think my soul has…has _mingled_ with Sherlock’s. That’s actually a bit…a bit repulsive.”

Then again, he was suddenly reminded of the Chinese tong case, and how well he and Sherlock had teamed up. It hadn’t just been Sherlock getting all the ideas and chasing all the leads…Maybe the detective was rubbing off on him, just a bit. And he couldn’t deny that Sherlock’s manners had changed somewhat—for the better, he’d wager—during their acquaintanceship.

These thoughts flashed through his mind in the space of a breath, but Gran Rose was watching him with a look just as keen as any he had ever seen on the pale face of Sherlock Holmes. She smiled at him over the edge of her tea cup.

“Most people these days talk about _anam charaid_ in its romantic connotations,” she shrugged. “You can get all sorts of cheap rings and things. But originally, it was more connected with brothers and men who fought alongside each other.”

“War does tend to forge bonds,” John agreed, another voice in his memory saying, _when you walk with Sherlock Holmes, you see the battlefield._

He frowned—a deep, lining frown that set his whole face into wrinkles—at his grandmother.

“ _Anam charaid_ , mm?”

She smiled, and took another drink, her gaze drifting away from him to look down at the still-playing children. “Mm. _Anam charaid_.”


	2. Chapter 2

"John."

He stood on her doorstep, dressed in his best suit, his hair limp from the light drizzle that was falling over Glasgow. Rose Connell pulled her housecoat tighter about her and reached for his arm. "Come in, Johnny," she said. "Come in."

He let her pull him into her small flat and then to the sofa in the living room. She sank down beside him, peering at his face sadly. The blank, shuttered-off look in his eyes broke her heart.

"You look like your granddad," she said softly, brushing imaginary lint off his sleeve. Peter Connell had been sixteen when he left for Germany, and only nineteen when he came home. He had lost friends in the war. Sometimes, Rose had held his hand at night, when he cried for them. The look in his eye then was the same as the one in John's now. Gran Rose knew those eyes.

John said nothing, his lips in a tight line as he looked down at his hands, clenching and unclenching in his lap. Gran Rose reached out, and covered his hands with her own. She could feel him shaking.

"Och, Johnny," she whispered. "John, my boy."

The ticking of the clock on the wall was like a hammer, beating out the seconds that stretched in silence. Gran Rose blinked back tears of her own, but she kept her peace, waiting for her grandson to speak.

Finally, he took a long, steadying breath.

"No one came," he said – and it was less spoken than released, like the hiss of air from a punctured tire. "Just me, Mrs. Hudson, and Lestrade."

Gran Rose rubbed the back of his hand with her thumb. "What about his brother—that government fellow?"

"Mycroft?" A laugh that was closer to a choke barked from John's chest. "He wouldn't dare." He tucked his chin into his chest, shoulders hunched. "Surprised Molly didn't come, though," he muttered.

"Might be too hard for the poor girl…" Gran Rose murmured, not so much to make conversation as to keep John talking.

"It—" John bit off the words, holding them behind his teeth for a moment before they pushed out anyway. "It's not fair—it isn't _right._ "

He pushed off the couch, pacing the three-stride width of Gran Rose's living room, his hands fisting at his sides. "He _helped_ —helped so many people," he forced out, each word separated from the rest like newspaper clippings in a ransom note.

"Saved their lives—solved their stupid, _stupid_ puzzles—made them _safe_. And… and none of them came. None of them came. They all believe he was—" His voice broke. "They all believe he was a fraud."

Gran Rose felt a tear trickle down her weathered cheek, and she lifted a hand to wipe it away. "He wasn't," she said. "At least I know that."

"How, Gran?" John moved across the room with the speed of a starving man, desperate for a scrap of bread. He crouched in front of her, taking her hands in his. "You never even met him—how do you know?"

"Oh, John… John, lad," Gran Rose tilted her head and rested her forehead against his. "I know him because I know you. You and Sherlock Holmes were _anam charaid_ —do you remember talking about that?"

John leaned back on his heals and closed his eyes. "Yes—soul friends. I…I remember."

Gran Rose loosed one of her hands from her grandson's grasp and rested it on his cheek.

"Your grandfather came back from the war with wounds," she said. "He had a knee that plagued him until he died. But his worst scars were on his spirit." She shook her head. "He lost so many… I never knew all their names. He did. He had them all in a notebook, and every seventh of May, he'd take it out and read them to himself. And then he'd take a long walk and when he came back…" Gran Rose paused, remembering nights when she had held her husband's hand as he cried, and silent mornings when they ate their breakfast in sad understanding, without a word ever said. "Och, Johnny—if I could take this away, I would, I really would."

He stood, and went to the window.

Gran Rose watched him, the way the grey light seeped around him and into him, weighing him down the same way that the drizzle weighed down the world outside. His shoulders—usually in a half-forgotten square of military strength—were slumped, his hand shoved into his pockets, his head bowed.

"It goes on, doesn't it," he said at long last. He half turned, looking back at his grandmother with half his face hidden in shadow. "It goes on, and it doesn't get better… But you have to…" he struggled for words. "You have to… get inside it, somehow. You have to make your world fit inside it and you have to—you have to…" he slumped, and a hand went up to cover his face.

Gran Rose sat helpless on the couch. She couldn't take the pain from her grandson, she could only see him through it. He had lost part of himself the day that Sherlock Holmes died on the pavement. _Anam charaid_ was a double-edged blade—she had learned that from her husband.

"I'll make tea," she said softly. "You can stay as long as you like."

John looked up at her, with an expression so lost and young that Gran Rose's heart broke.

"Tea," he said, his voice like a child's. He turned back to the window, to the sky that was weeping the tears he wouldn't shed. "Thank you."

She stood, and went into the kitchen, leaving her grandson standing alone. Picking up her kettle from the kitchen table, she leaned on the counter and closed her eyes.

"Och, Peter," she whispered. "Our boy needs you."

There was no answer. There never was.

Gran Rose sighed, and turned on the water.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So... I never planned to make Anam Charaid more than just a one-shot. I love Gran Rose, but I had honestly never planned to do anything more with her. But today I just had a craving for angst, and none of the fics I was reading were quite doing the trick... So I wondered, John has no one to turn to after the fall... What if he went to his grandmother? And... It kinda just grew from there. Hope you like it. I may, at some point, go back and do more one-shots with Gran Rose. She's a fun OC - no messy romantic bother or reason for OOC Sherlock or John... Yeah. Anyway, enjoy your daily dose of Reichen-angst.


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